


Links

by mitzirocker



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Twitch Plays Pokemon (Let's Play)
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, Metaphysics, Worldbuilding, basically an infodump, fantheory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25895287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzirocker/pseuds/mitzirocker
Summary: Why, in a world of natural forces and ancient magic, where even the humblest creature has immense elemental powers, is there a completely ordinary race of Earth-style humans?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Links

**Author's Note:**

> It’s the kind of thing that underpins a lot of what happens in my stories, but is very hard to bring up within one of those stories. I’ve been meaning to write a post explaining it for years, but only got round to it recently.

If any of the licensed media was interrogative of its own worldbuilding, there’d probably be an official name for this question. The paradox of humanity, or something. It’s a pretty obvious question if you think about the pokémon world for more than a minute; in a world where dogs can breathe fire and butterflies have psychic powers, why is there a race of bog-standard, boring, baseline humans around?

Obviously the Doylist answer is it’s because the games are designed to be played by humans, specifically very young humans who don’t care about complicated lore explanations, but (1) Mystery Dungeon and (2) where’s the fun in that? I have my own answer to this question, and I’ve wound up using it in basically every pokéverse I write that has both humans and pokémon. I find its implications really interesting to play around with.

To start with, I don’t think humans are pokémon. I know some people solve the paradox by saying they are, but that doesn’t work for me. Why? Well - pokéverse humans are bog-standard! Yes, some of them are psychics and ki manipulators, but they’re supernatural in the same way people are in our world’s fantasy stories, not in the same way as psychic-type and fighting-type pokémon. They can’t use moves or participate directly in battles, grow instead of evolve, use items and technology even supercomputer-intelligent pokémon don’t, and if they hatched from eggs I think we would have heard about it by now. Pokéverse humans are humans just like the five-year-olds this fictional space is designed to interact with, not some weird magical aliens. Which begs the question - if humans aren’t pokémon, what are they, and where did they come from?

Do non-pokémon animals exist in pokéverses? For the purposes of my own writing, I assume they do. I know a lot of people disagree with me on that, and I’m not saying I’m objectively correct, but I find the idea interesting, and I can justify my choice in a couple of ways. For one, it means carnivorous pokémon have things to eat that aren’t other pokémon. I read all pokémon as some kind of sentient, and while the pokéverse is loaded with dark implications, I personally find these particular implications way too obviously grimdark. The childish happy-go-lucky mood of most pokéverses may be a mask, but it’s not that thin of a mask.

I could talk about weird things in the pokédex, entries and categories that mention real-world animals, and that one episode of the anime with the fish, but that’s kind of splitting hairs, and I’m already picking and choosing which bits of canon I want to keep anyway. I could talk about ecosystems and biodiversity and how there are way too few species of pokémon to keep most biological environments going, but that line of thinking would quickly get way too technical even for me. However, the line of reason I find most compelling is how people in pokéverses don’t talk about pokémon the way people in our world talk about animals. You don’t get everyone going, “Oh yeah, animals are great,” or “I train animals,” here, do you? You don’t comment so much on the way humans and animals interact in your society - why would you need to? You don’t even think about ‘animals’ as a class that often - you think of ‘cats’ or ‘insects’ or ‘farm animals’, because it’s more practical to split up that massive diverse group with specific subsets. They’re not something big and important, they’re just one piece of how the world works.

And humans in pokéverses _don’t think about pokémon that way_. To them, pokémon are a single distinct group, special and unique, always remarked upon, always something slightly out of the ordinary, apart from the human world. I’ve said before that my favourite weird implication of the Gen 1 fluff is the idea that pokémon are new to the world itself, and the very fact that that’s an impression a pokéverse can give off says a lot about how humans and pokémon relate to each other. Even as they inhabit the same worlds, they just don’t quite fit together, forever in a dialogue as they negotiate their ever-changing partnership between equals. (And if those parties are in fact less than equal, it’s not humanity which holds the advantage.)

But even with all that, I spent a while hesitating on declaring pokémon definitively Not Animals. Then I watched this one episode of the anime - early XY, can’t remember the title. A scatterbug evolves into a spewpa onscreen, and it does this by dissolving into a stream of shapeless blue light that reforms as a spewpa. Everyone in-universe acts like this is totally normal, but it scared the shit out of me. It’s so obviously inorganic! It arcs up into the air to form the spewpa’s body! _The scatterbug’s head splits in two!_ What the hell _is_ this thing?! Does it even have a physical form at all?!

That scene clinched it for me. Since then, I’ve interpreted pokémon as more spirits or fae or youkai than actual physical flesh-and-blood animals. Their bodies look and feel like part of the world around them, but at any moment muscle and tendon can flash back into pure energy, ready to be sculpted into another form. They instinctively control elemental magics, communicate with each other by emotion-based soul-to-soul links that are nearly impossible to translate. While they shape and are shaped by the rhythms of the natural world, they’re not bound by it in the same way even humans are.

So if pokémon are these weird spirit creatures, living in a world of ordinaryish humans and ordinaryish plants... Well, those humans and plants had to come from somewhere, didn’t they? The existence of fossil pokémon confirms that evolution in the sense it’s used the real world is generally a thing in pokéverses, and the franchise has such a science-y aesthetic I don’t think saying just humans specifically were intelligently designed works. Pokéverse humans evolved into their current forms, which means there were monkeys for them to evolve from and shrews for _them_ to evolve from, and so on and so forth until we’ve filled in the entire animal kingdom. Pokéverse animals are probably a lot less domesticated than IRL ones, which is my excuse for why they don’t show up in the media, but they’re definitely out there, pollinating flowers and forming coral, keeping the many ecosystems of the pokéverses running. As to why, if real-world animals exist, so many pokémon look and act like animals... Well, the existence of vanillite doesn’t negate the existence of Castelia cones. Pokémon forms have always mimicked the world around them, animal and vegetable and mineral alike. They just have more options now.

So, to summarise. In my take on the pokéverses, pokémon are magical creatures that operate more like mythical spirits than real-life animals. They live in a world full of non-magical plants and animals that evolved through reasonably familiar processes, and pokémon tend to look like them because they pattern their bodies off the world around them. Humans are just another kind of animal, like in our world, unique, but not inherently special. Where exactly pokémon came from and the intricacies of how they interact with the animal kingdom vary between pokéverses - the evolutionary history of the TPPverse is not that of the Greenverse, for example - but the basic framework remains the same. No matter the details of each specific pokéverse, its humans live in a world where fairies are real.

Got that? Good. Now it’s time to talk about the best part of any Pokémon fanwank - the horrifying implications! :D

Pokémon have souls, obviously. More precisely, they’re made of soul. That blue light they turn into when they drop their physical forms is pure soulstuff, inherently sentient, extremely magical, able to craft bodies out of atmospheric matter. Having-slash-being souls is how pokémon are able to control the elements, heal from almost any injury, and talk, for lack of a better term. Soulstuff can be damaged and destroyed, yes, but as long as one little clump of a particular cluster remains, the pokémon it forms can always come back.

Animals, on the other hand, don’t have souls. Why would they? They’re made of meat! They’re completely physical beings, biological machines with no magic to their function. If they’re sentient, it’s because the systems required to run those machines are naturally complex enough to produce sentience, no soulstuff required, and whatever intelligence their bags of chemicals and electricity can produce is slapdash and venal compared to any pokémon’s mind. What makes humans different then, you might ask? Trick question: they aren’t.

Pokéverse humans don’t have souls. Their sapience is a byproduct of having to process incredibly complicated social networks, not an inherent feature of their being. When their bodies break, they’re way worse than pokémon at recovering from injuries, because while pokémon can draw on their soulstuff reserves, for humans there’s just nothing else _there_. There’s nothing for soul-to-soul communication to latch onto, nothing that can reach out and alter the very elements of the world around them. It’s just meat and electrical signals, and when those inevitably fall apart, the person they created is lost forever. In a world of spirits and magic, humans are mere powerless animals.

There’s a reason these worlds are called pokémon worlds, after all. There’s a reason why, in these worlds, human civilisation and technology tends towards the small-scale, tiny towns separated by vast wilderness. It’s not because pokéverses are inherently inimical to humans, because they aren’t. They’re just another kind of animal in worlds full of them, part of ecosystems that are controlled and maintained by pokémon. Humans can’t achieve unilateral mastery over their environment in these worlds. On some level, they always have to negotiate with pokémon, and though pokémon are generally more agreeable than traditional fae they can be just as capricious and inscrutable. Humans aren’t the most important actors in these worlds, the beings the spotlight of history naturally gravitates to. Pokémon are, and always have been.

But if that’s true, why does human civilisation even exist in the first place? Why aren’t humans still hunter-gatherers striding across the not-African savannah they were born on? The answer to that question is a little complicated, and involves the one thing that is actually special about humanity. To explain what that is, I first have to talk about Pokémon Conquest.

Pokémon Conquest is a Gen 5 sidegame released for the DS with turn-based six-on-six pokémon battles, and also it’s a crossover with a dense and storied grand strategy series about the medieval Japanese Warring States period. It’s an interesting game, and its mechanics play with the idea of humans training pokémon in interesting ways. For one, the humans are statted-up gameplay elements like the pokémon, with special skills and pokémon they’re better at training and stuff. For another, the ~special connection between trainers and their pokémon~ we hear about off and on is part of the game’s mechanics.

See, instead of levelling, Conquest has pokémon get stronger and evolve by building links with their human partners. Humans don’t catch pokémon in the world of Conquest; instead, they form links with wild pokémon, tapping into a stream of shining golden orbs until human and pokémon meet at last, minds linked by golden strands of light. That link can be strengthened by battling together, of course, but it can also strengthen by going shopping or visiting the hot springs together. As the link improves, both human and pokémon grow ever stronger and ever closer. Even evolutions are triggered by creating a strong enough link.

This concept, this idea of magical bonds between humans and pokémon, is something I’ve run with to the point where I think of it as the main way humans and pokémon interact. The specific details of how they work vary a little between pokéverses, but in all the worlds where humanity is relevant, it’s because they’re able to latch onto pokémon’s souls. 

Like I said earlier, pokémon communicate directly from soul to soul. If two pokémon’s souls are connected, they can feel each other’s emotions, read each other’s minds to an extent. For reasons that vary between pokéverses, humans have the unique ability to act as potential endpoints for that connection. Since they don’t actually have souls, though, any connection that allows human and pokémon to communicate is by necessity pretty intense. 

These links bind together pokémon and human on a deep emotional level, allowing them to bypass all their myriad differences and truly understand each other. A human and pokémon with a strong enough link act more like a single unit than two separate beings, compensating for each other’s weaknesses and reinforcing each other’s strengths, entwined in an elaborate and ever-changing dance. Granted, most links don’t run that deep, and it’s generally more common for a human to have weaker links to a few pokémon than a stronger link to just one, but even the shallowest link allows human and pokémon to achieve so much more together than they ever could alone.

For humans, the benefits of a link are obvious. The ability to talk to pokémon lets humans negotiate with the beings that control their environment, even ask them to use their vast elemental powers in helpful ways. Partnering with pokémon lets humans step outside the harsh boundaries that define an animal’s day-to-day existence and explore the vast world beyond. Able to protect themselves from the forces of nature, able to cross the wilderness to find perfect places to live, able to understand how their habitats work and how they can and should change it, with pokémon at their side humanity has spread all across the globe.

If pokémon give humans the power to exceed the limits of the natural world, humans give pokémon the drive to push beyond the boundaries of everyday existence. It’s not that pokémon don’t have adventures and squabbles and the occasional massive disaster, because they do. It’s just that it all returns to the status quo soon enough, the same pokémon in the same forms in the same place, century in and century out. Left to their own devices, pokémon just don’t change much, because they don’t need to. Why fix what isn’t broken?

Humans, on the other hand, are animals, always searching and grasping and clawing and struggling, looking for any possible edge on a world that’s out to get them. They’re opportunistic and dynamic and they change so fast, and being linked with those alien minds grants a pokémon some of that vibrant capacity to grow and evolve. The link gives pokémon a push to step outside the rhythms of normality and fly free and unrestrained, racing far past the horizon, becoming people they never could have been within the regular rhythms of nature. Not all pokémon are into that sort of thing, of course, and not all links lead to region-crossing epic quests, but for the pokémon who long to see what lies beyond the world they know, linking with a human gives them the freedom to live exciting, dangerous, unpredictable lives. There are pokéverses out there where humans are one of the weirdest and coolest things that have ever happened, and the pokémon that live among them can’t wait to see what they do next.

None of that cost-benefit analysis, though, is why links exist. As per usual, the details of its history vary between pokéverses, but at the start there is always a deep and intimate friendship between human and pokémon. Despite how different they are, they come to understand each other, and live and laugh and fight and wander together, for no other reason than the fact that they’re friends. Ever since then, young humans and immature pokémon have set off on journeys together, building up an emotional connection until it runs soul-deep. What a link really is, is a close friendship with some magical junk sprinkled on top. All the things that magical junk does are nice extras, but they’re not directly the point. It’s the partnership between human and pokémon the link enables that really matters.

Civilisation in pokéverses is inherently a collaborative project, negotiated every step of the way between everyone it affects and always taking account of the needs of the ecosystems it happens in. Things like environmental destruction and species going extinct and severe pollution don’t happen nearly so much in pokéverses. This isn’t to say that humans never have negative effects on their environment, because they can and frequently do, but working with pokémon and the world around them it’s a lot easier to fix things afterwards. The civilisations humans build in pokéverses may be small-scale and kind of petty, but they’re also stable and resilient, and very much an unambiguously good thing for everyone involved. There are pokéverses out there where humanity itself has vanished, but the pokémon they left behind still make ribbons and build villages and band together to stop disasters, the same way humanity did, long after they’re gone.

That’s what’s actually special about humanity. Despite being pitiful and fragile animals, completely mundane in worlds full of magic, through making connections with pokémon, they’ve found a way to matter.

A footnote: it’s not entirely accurate to say that pokéverse humans don’t have souls. They don’t naturally have them, it’s true, but through their bonds with pokémon, they can create them. If a human and pokémon are linked strongly enough, deep enough in each other’s minds, bits of the pokémon’s soulstuff can start rubbing off onto the human. Over time, that soulstuff can build up into a little pseudosoul, glomming onto the human’s consciousness and giving it a metaphysical shape. Pseudosouls are impossibly small and fragile by pokémon standards, but even the weakest pseudosoul lets a human sense the magic that pervades throughout the entire world. Stronger pseudosouls can communicate directly with pokémon souls without carefully forming a link; granted, it’s a rare genius who can project and receive in anything near the complexity pokémon are capable of, but even so, there are humans who can talk! The strongest pseudosouls can magically control the elements in the same way as pokémon, though on a much smaller scale. They’re limited enough by their physical forms that it’s usually the purely mental abilities, like psychic powers and ki manipulation, that manifest, but in theory it’s completely possible that somewhere out there is a pokéverse waterbender. It’s a big multiverse, after all.

It is true that pseudosouls are too frail to support a consciousness alone, and that when a human’s body breaks down their soulstuff dissipates. It’s also true that when humans started linking with pokémon all those hundreds of thousands of years ago, they weren’t able to accumulate soulstuff at all. Humans evolved the ability to form pseudosouls, and their links and relationships with pokémon are still evolving even now. Maybe a few million years down the line, they’ll be a subset of pokémon with physical bodies and an instinctive drive to change the world. Or maybe both humans and pokémon will have become something unimaginably strange and wonderful, able to step past all the world’s barriers and reach out together to grasp the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> ... Except for the SSB space AU, where pokémon are something totally different, and :rambles off into the distance:


End file.
